DailyTech revealed last week ATI's new pricing strategy to compete with NVIDIA's GTS 250 rebrand, also known as the 9800 GTX+.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB was to drop to $129, while the Radeon HD 4870 512MB was scheduled to be cut to $149. This was supposed to be accomplished primarily through the use of mail-in rebates, which ATI would help offset.

Most of the board partners took up the offer on the 4850. However, due to several factors converging at once, the 4850 can now be picked up for around $120 at several e-tailers, albeit with the mail-in rebate.

The story with the 4870 is something else entirely. The Radeon HD 4870 512MB was supposed to drop to $149 with a mail-in rebate, but some of ATI's graphics card partners are resisting this as they feel that since the card outperforms the GTX 260, it should compete against that card. They instead are positioning the 1GB version of the 4850 against the 1GB version of the GTS 250 at the $149 price point.

One of our sources in Taiwan told us: "The ATI lineup is very strong, and we feel the 4850 should go against the GTS 250 and the 4870 against the GTX 260".

ATI has been very aggressive with its pricing, with lower prices and higher performance in the same segments as its nemesis NVIDIA. This has led to declining revenues for board manufacturers, already hard hit by lower demand due to the global recession.

GTX 280

ATI Radeon 4870

GTX 260 Core 216

ATI Radeon HD 4850

GTS 250

Stream Processors

240

800

216

800

128

Texture Address / Filtering

80 / 80

40

72/72

40

64 / 64

ROPs

32

16

28

16

16

Core Clock

602MHz

750MHz

576MHz

625MHz

738MHz

Memory Clock

1107MHz

900MHz GDDR5 (3600MHz eff)

999MHz

993MHz GDDR3 (1986MHz eff)

1100MHz

Memory Bus Width

512-bit

256-bit

448-bit

256-bit

256-bit

Frame Buffer

1GB

512MB

896MB

512MB

512MB

Transistor Count

1.4B

956M

1.4B

956M

754M

Price Point

$349

$149

$199

$129

$129

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Nice try, the problem is even the numbers show NVidia with 65% of all the market share. Oh well, live in your red rooster dream world - you know the one. The one where charts put ATI ddr3 speeds at 2x on them, and leave the NVidia memeory at the lower rate, never noted to be twice as fast as listed. (look above if you haven't a clue what I'm speaking of ).\ Yes, also the world where " 800 shaders " is realy a multiple of FIVE when it comes to equivalency with the listed competition... yes only 160 in reality - inside the chip... but listed as 800, 800 sounds like a lot more than 192 or 216, huh... to the brainwashed red crowing cocks below... whereas 160 ( the actual number) is BELOW 216 or 192.... It's all so much bs - and ATI has lost BILLIONS, and so has AMD... It's not NVidia that has been in danger of collapsing for nearly 3 years now. Come on shuckster, face the music.